DLB — A Dynamic Load Balancing Tool for Grid Computing

Publisher Summary This chapter presents a version of dynamic load balancing (DLB), developed at the IUPUI CFD Laboratory. Some changes are made to the previous version to make it more compact and distributable with a three-dimensional test case such that those who are interested in using DLB can have a complete package in a compact form. The chapter demonstrates applicability of the environment by using a parallel example program for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) applications. System load measurement of DLB is modified with average load history provided by Unix/Linux systems rather than tracking processes by system agents of the DLB package. In addition, load balancer program is implemented in Java same as all other units of the DLB to make it all in one language. Parallel simulations show that DLB makes significant improvement for better load balance on the system. File I/O and running DLB is smooth. Using LAM/MPI makes program start and halt easier than MPICH due to starting/halting parallel environment with daemons running on all compute nodes. In this version, a user provides script file to start/halt all programs and environments and running of DLB for several cycles. This can be automated further by providing a better user interface to DLB package.